He was the
first person I had met in my life who I didn’t feel was trying to sell me
something, or convince me of something, or show me anything about himself.

In Japan
I’ve never been to a place as good as Tassajara to practice. It is a very
wonderful place.

Jim Morton
interviewed by DC
At his brother Rick's cabinet shop in Sausalito, CA.
Rick was there too.
September 2012

DC: This is Jim Morton, in
Sausalito, visiting from Kyoto. What’s happening in Japan as a result of
Fukushima, from your perspective?

JM: Yeah it’s an interesting
situation. The Japanese reaction to it is really different from what
Americans would be. Japanese are so -- they live and think and feel in
patterns, much more than we do. Fukushima was a disaster -- the tidal
wave, and the reactor disaster, is beyond imagination, really. 25,000
people wiped out by this inky wave, within minutes.

DC: Do you know who Moriyama
is, was? He ran Sokoji after Suzuki left. Anyway, he is one of those
teachers who had Western students. He is missing. He was in Northern
Japan, and he has never been seen since the tsunami.

JM: I can believe it. There
are all these little villages -- it’s all mountainous -- in Japan most of
the population lives in these little deltas, these little alluvial plain
areas along the seacoast. Even Osaka and Tokyo are very large versions of
the same thing. So when this tidal wave hit that area -- they form like a
funnel, so as the wave went inward, it was squeezed in between the
mountains, and the level went up and up and up. The water level. I was
looking at Yahoo news on the computer from America, and I saw the
announcement from the States before I heard it on Japanese media. Because
I don’t have a television any more. So minutes after the earthquake hit
and before there was any report of the tidal wave, the magnitude of the
earthquake was so huge, it just really astonished me.

DC: What was it?

JM: Almost 8, or something
like that. Their scale is a little bit different than the Richter scale.
But anyway it was the strongest earthquake recorded since that type of
seismic scale in use. I knew it was going to be a disaster, and then the
reports of the magnitude of the disaster kept coming in. I got most of my
information right off the internet.

The Japanese reaction to that
type of thing is so different from Americans. Very calm about it. They
don’t emote very strongly, as you know. So on the surface, life seems to
have continued going on the same way, although the news was filled with
only that for weeks and weeks. Even now, every day in the newspapers there
are radiation level reports, with a target around the Fukushima reactor.

DC: I see stuff on the
Internet that is predicting more dire results.

JM: Yes. But you get more
honest reporting from America than you do from Japan because they don’t
want people to -- there’s nowhere to go! People have to live with it.

DC: There is a strong
anti-nuclear feeling in Japan...

JM: Very strong. There are
anti-nuclear demonstrations with thousands and thousands of people that
are almost not recorded -- barely mentioned in the national news media.

DC: We’ve had that here, like
with the anti-Iraq war demonstrations -- in America they were giant, and
San Francisco media hardly carried. Biggest demonstration I ever saw in
San Francisco. It was the largest demonstration in the history of the
world, worldwide. But I’m sure Japan can beat us in denial!

JM: Yeah. But life continues.
There is no visible change in the pattern of life at least where we are.

DC: Has the radiation affected
Kyoto?

JM: It hasn’t changed the
behavior.

DC: I mean is there radiation
in Kyoto?

JM: Not that anybody reports.

DC: What about in food?

JM: For a while you could get
some vegetables and so forth extremely cheap, because people didn’t want
to buy them if they thought they came from that part of the country. But
most of that has died down now. Either the food is coming from somewhere
else or people are just closing their eyes to it, that’s all. Life just
has to go on, you know.

DC: Let’s go back to you
coming to Zen Center. When did you first come?

JM: The first time I visited
old Sokoji on Bush Street was in the summer of 1966. I was still going to
Rhode Island School of Design. Rick had come out here, I think in 1965. We
didn’t talk on telephones in those days -- so often because it was too
expensive -- so he wrote and told me that he had visited Zen Center and
was very impressed with Suzuki Roshi. So I was excited about that. I came
out here in the summer of 1966 and stayed out here the whole summer. I
went to Zen Center and got instructions in zazen. Then I went back and sat
alone during my last year at RISD. But I was absolutely determined to come
back and study under Suzuki Roshi. I figured that the direction of my life
had been decided from the moment I first crossed my legs and started to do
zazen. I had this strong feeling that I had either done it before or --
anyway, I had this feeling that everything in my life up until that time
was just like wandering in the desert looking for something. As soon as I
started doing zazen I knew that was it. That was what I was supposed to be
doing in life. I felt like I had come home, in a sense. I had a rather
interesting -- it all started with LSD, as it did with Rick. I had a
powerful experience with that. At one point I was walking down a path in
this bird sanctuary where we went, in Rhode Island. There was a turn in
the path and right at the turn in the path there was a flat stone that a
tree or bush was arching over, making a little alcove. I sat in there and
crossed my legs, for some reason, even though I knew almost nothing about
Buddhism. I crossed my legs in lotus posture. At that moment this
tremendous force seemed to come rushing up out of the earth through me.
That was the first time I had any idea that there was any relationship
between that experience and meditation. I felt that the lotus posture was
the key to enormous power.

Anyway I tried LSD a few more
times but I realized that it was not going to go anywhere. Everybody gets
one good peek, if that, but going back for more and more peeks didn’t lead
anywhere; just kind of voyeurism, looking in from the outside, over and
over again.

As I was growing up, we had a
really nice childhood in Vermont. But after I got into high school I sort
of lost my ambition to do anything. All the things that I was told by my
teachers and my parents and so forth that I ought to try and want to be,
didn’t appeal to me at all. We were always drawing pictures. I was good at
art. I went down to Rhode Island School of Design, where somebody in my
neighborhood was going. Our art teacher in high school that we respected a
lot went there. I saw all these people walking around with paint all over
their clothes, wild hair and everything, and I thought, Wow, this is for
me! [laughs]. I got very different ideas about art once I got there. I
wanted to be an illustrator but once I went there and started learning
about Picasso and Matisse, Paul Klee and people like that, I thought that
was the direction to go in.

I suppose it did feel a little
bit unsatisfied or empty. But once I had that experience with LSD I
realized that there was something infinitely more valuable to pursue than
that.

Then after that, my best
friend in RISD took an English course from a temporary English teacher
there that he said had spent some time in an ashram in India. My friend
heard from his teacher that the teacher had -- it was one of these
temporary teaching jobs; he spent a couple of years at that college. But
this teacher had spent a little time in India. I got my friend to
introduce me to him, and I asked him about meditation. I had no idea about
mediation. I thought Yoga and Zen were about the same thing. I know Zen is
a kind of Yoga, but I didn’t know one from the other. I read Alan Watt’s
The Way of Zen. It didn’t mean anything to me; just nonsense. This guy
started asking me questions. Well first of all he invited me up to his
office and said, Let’s talk about it. He was say, What would you do that
only relates to us right here and now, and not to anything else? Nobody
had ever asked me a question like that before. It was like a koan. It
turned out later that I was making my own interpretations of his questions
that were really beyond what he intended.

So he kept asking me. I
couldn’t think of what to say that related only to the two of us sitting
there at that time and had no connection to anything else outside of that
room at that moment. Finally I just took his hand, to shake his hand. And
he said, OK, what would you do next? So I took his other hand. Because I
couldn’t think of anything else to do. I found out later, many years
later, when I was doing koan practice in Tofukuji, that that is what koan
practice is like.

Little by little this way we
developed a kind of style of meditation in which both of us would perform
these motions, taking each other’s hands in different forms, crossways,
this way and that way. We would do this all night, maybe once or twice a
week, do this all night until daybreak. It was rather intense. But I found
that if I held one position for a long time, like half an hour or an hour,
holding his hand, this way or that way, with no particular -- he wasn’t
gay, and I wasn’t -- actually I felt rather uncomfortable doing that, but
I felt at the same time that doing something uncomfortable and crossing
some barrier, the barrier being aversion to anything of a homosexual
nature, or that kind of implication, somehow breaking through that type of
barrier was a part of it, seeing this act as completely neutral, an act
with no other meaning except the act itself.

Anyway, for the first time in
my life I also conceived of the idea of an act that had no other meaning
except the act itself. It was not for something. I never thought of the
possibility of such a thing except for an accidental act. Acts are
normally for something or to accomplish something. But an act where the
entire meaning and purpose of it is in the act itself, nothing outside of
it, before or afterwards, that was the first time I had any inkling of
such a thing. But I found out that if I held one position for a long time,
half an hour or an hour or so, that some kind of marvelous power started
arising in my psyche, in my feelings, my mind, consciousness. So I didn’t
really want to change as much as this other guy did.

That was in January or
February of 1966. It was maybe around April or so that Rick wrote me about
Zen Center. I was very interested in going there. So after school finished
I drove out to the west coast with a friend who was driving his little
sister to some dude ranch in Wyoming, and we finished driving across the
country. I stayed there in San Francisco. Rick was living in North Beach
at the time, going to the Art Institute, working in the shipyards, part
time. So I did that too. And went to Zen Center and got instructions from
Katagiri Roshi [sensei at the time]. I met Suzuki Roshi -- I listened to
him talk once or twice, but I didn’t get a chance to go there that often.
But I did get instruction directly from Katagiri Roshi. I knew I had to go
back to school. Rick had mentioned that Suzuki Roshi said one time that it
is very difficult to do zazen by yourself. I took this very seriously. I
thought, I have to go back to school but I want to continue doing zazen.
So I asked to see Suzuki Roshi. It was the first time I talked to him
personally. One thing that impressed me very deeply about talking to him
is that he was the first person I had met in my life who I didn’t feel was
trying to sell me something, or convince me of something, or show me
anything about himself. This really had an impact on me. I had never met
such a person before.

I felt really really nervous
talking with him. I just said, I have to go back to school and I wanted to
try to do zazen by myself. And he said, You can do it. Which surprised me,
because Rick had already said that he said zazen was very difficult or you
shouldn’t try to do zazen by yourself or something like that. So I took
this very seriously. I did go back and sat a little bit now and then
during the last year of RISD. I had very strong experiences while I did
that. Like I would see things, I would have hallucinations. One time I
thought I was on the verge of leaving my body and it scared me so much
that I came out of that.

After I graduated, my friend
was driving out to California again but I couldn’t go with him because I
had to see my draft board. So I flew out. It was my first airplane flight.

DC: What happened with the
draft board?

JM: I was going to apply for a
conscientious objector status, but they said no. By that time the
government had already said Enough of this nonsense. The only way you
could get away with conscientious objector was if you were a formal member
of a -- you had to be a Quaker, or --

DC: Zen Center had COs. But
they weren’t doing it for religious reasons -- they were Tassajara Fire
Department. Like Ed Brown and some others.

JM: I was a kind of
groundbreaker. Later on, in January of 1968 I had to take my Army physical
in Oakland, but it turned out I was able to convince them I wasn’t what
they wanted. At that time the anti-war movement had gotten really strong.
I got to see the psychiatrist and he was very sympathetic, he said, You
don’t have to go, and he gave me a psychological deferment. My draft board
was obliging, too. They just sent me a letter saying, Is your problem
cured? and I said No, and I got a 4-F status. But that was kind of an
experience, going through the Oakland induction center, in 1968, at the
height of the hippie period. That is another whole story. I found out then
about the dark side of the ego. The ego has two sides to it: one, all the
things that you want to be, and that you want people to think you are. But
the other side of that is everything that you are afraid that you are and
that you have bad dreams about being. You can only summon this side of
your ego under extreme circumstances. That was a pretty extreme
circumstance. So I made myself into the worst thing I was afraid I might
be.

Rick: I did the same thing.
That is exactly how I got out, too.

DC: Me too.

Rick: It took me two weeks to
stop feeling horrible about myself.

JM: Me too. It took a couple
of weeks to get over it.

Rick: Every minute I felt
this wall that I had hit myself with.

JM: When I got back -- I don’t
know if the first training period had already started -- when did it
start?

DC: July 4, 1967.

JM: When I came back in 1967,
after graduation, I flew out. I was here before it started, and Rick went
down. I continued living in his apartment on Mason Street, in North Beach.
Right down near Fisherman’s Wharf. I used to bicycle. It was so
interesting. I still have a scar here on my eyebrow -- I think the first
day I wanted to go to zazen, after I arrived, I was sleeping on the floor
of Rick’s room, and the alarm went off. I was so anxious to get there and
do zazen early in the morning, I was in a sleeping bag or something on the
floor, and I hit my head on the table, and I still have the scar from
that. This scar is the badge, my memorial or whatever, of my first day to
go to Zen Center.

This is kind of a typical
story from those days. Pedaling my bicycle through that long tunnel -- the
Broadway tunnel -- to get from down there up to Bush Street, it was early
in the morning and all this fog was swirling around, and I saw this one
solitary figure walking along the sidewalk through the tunnel, way in the
end. I was still half asleep, and I was riding along the sidewalk -- it is
a raised sidewalk with a railing on it -- it is too dangerous to ride on
the roadway -- I was looking at this figure and wondering who could be
walking around at that time of the morning, in the cold and the fog. When
we met, he was a friend of mine from Rhode Island School of Design! Howard
Hastings in the sculpture department. We weren’t even surprised to see one
another. I said, Hi Howard! Everybody was going out there at that time; it
didn’t seem so strange to see him there.

So I sat there, as much as I
could, all through the summer. I had no idea how to look for work. I went
to the employment office, and they sent me here and there. I got a little
bit of temporary work. But as time went on I started getting very anxious.
I had no idea how to look for work or what I should do. No experience with
it. I was teaching guitar in a little music store on Union Street --

Rick: Marina Music, on Union
and Laguna.

Jim: I got all my ideas from
Rick. Working in the shipyards and everything. But when Rick was away in
Tassajara for the first training period I was on my own. Anyway this
housewife that I was teaching guitar to asked me one day if I could handle
woodworking tools. I said, Yeah. I grew up using those things. She said
her husband had a custom furniture shop near there and was looking for a
helper. So I went in. The guy said, Here’s a little job for you to do,
over at this workbench, plane this wood and do this and that. He watched
me while I was doing it. Not standing over me -- he was doing something
himself, but he kept his eye on me -- didn’t say anything. Later on he
called me and hired me.

I had a kind of anxiety
attack, I put so much pressure on myself. Everything that I thought I
could be or wanted to be, or ought to be, while I was in college -- I
found I was totally powerless to make any of that happen. I started
feeling horrible. In August there was a sesshin at Zen Center, and that
was my first sesshin. I thought, this is a chance for me to break out of
this. I had no idea what an anxiety attack was and I had no idea that you
could take drugs for that kind of thing. It was really awful. I would feel
fine when I would wake up in the morning, then when I would remember about
the anxiety, the anxiety would come back.

I did the week sesshin at Zen
Center. I went up there every day and sat all day. It was really
excruciating pain for me. A one week sesshin. Really painful. But I just
sat as hard as I could. I tried my best to endure the pain. I had no idea
what zazen was about, really, but I just tried to do it. It is hard for me
to remember so clearly, but suddenly in the midst of this pain that seemed
unendurable in a way, I suddenly had the idea -- the image of a thread or
a string appeared in my mind, that if I pulled on it, psychically at
least, in my imagination, it might lead me somewhere. So I followed it. I
haven’t thought about these things for years and years, so it’s hard to
remember exactly how it happened. I felt that some door opened. I entered
into a place in which, if I just balanced, kept my mind in balance, like
walking on a tightrope or something, then the pain was endurable. It
didn’t become numb or anything like that, but the panic wasn’t there. The
pain was just the pain; it was the same pain, but the screaming inside my
head, the panic to escape from that situation, calmed down. I found if I
kept my mind balanced, like balancing an egg on the end of your finger or
something, and kept my concentration right in that moment, I could do it.

Once I got the idea, the idea
of balancing my mind in that way, like balancing a ball on your finger, or
the edge of a knife, it was then that the feeling of some kind of a door
opened. This interesting, powerful feeling emerged and started appearing
in my zazen. But that day, after the last period of zazen was over,
something in my mind told me that I wasn’t going back the next day. When I
got back home, they told me that the cabinet maker had called and wanted
to hire me. So I didn’t go back to the sesshin; I went to work for him.

So that was my introduction to
furniture making. I had no experience working at a job. I thought working
at one job for a couple of months was a long time, in those days. As soon
as the training period was over, and most people came back, I heard that
people were going down there for work weekends. So I started going to
Tassajara for a few work weekends. That was the first time I went down
there. It was a rather frightening experience. That photograph in Crooked
Cucumber that you say was in the first work period, I am standing in the
back row, that was one of the work weekends.

DC: I’ve realized that
because of some of the people who are there -- Niels is in it.

JM: There I am in the back
row. Then I went down -- I got Rick to replace me at the furniture shop
and I went down to live at Tassajara.

Rick: And that’s why you’re
here today.

DC: What is the name of the
furniture shop -- is it that good, high-quality one -- Paul Rosenblum
worked there later? What was it called?

JM: Gatti. Furniture by Gatti.
Actually on the way from the airport this time, we had to pick up
something from near there that he ordered from a glass shop, so we visited
him. We are still on very good terms.

DC: He is still there?

JM: He is not in the same shop
-- he is still in the City, making great furniture. We are still very good
friends.

DC: How old is he?

JM: 70-something. He would be
77; I am 67.

DC: So you went down sometime
in Fall 1967? There wasn’t a practice period until spring.

JM: That’s true. I went down
there to live in maybe October, beginning of October. I didn’t work at the
furniture shop very long, because I felt like doing zazen was what I was
born to do. I felt extremely, in a sense desperate, to continue my
practice. I thought there is nothing else in life for me than that. That
is all I wanted to do. I had no idea what I might do with it, or what it
might lead to. I was compelled to continue this practice and follow this
way. This experience that I had during the first sesshin just fired my
desire even more strongly. That experience that I had in the August
sesshin was not just becoming able to sit with and endure pain. It was
something that opened up my whole mind, in a way that continued even after
I went home.

Actually, it wasn’t the same
day -- after it first started happening, there was another day that I sat,
in which the entire day was like that and it became even stronger. I felt
like my whole mind had opened up. Then the furniture maker called and I
had to stop. So I felt I had to continue; I had to follow that up no
matter what. No way that I could not do that, no way I could stop. So I
went down to Tassajara.

Zazen was always physically
quite difficult for me. Was never comfortable; always painful. I tried to
sit in full lotus as much as possible. But like everybody, once I got to
Tassajara and got more used to the practice, there was temptation to just
sit and think poetic thoughts. Psychologically living in Tassajara was so
much easier than living in the outside world. I could see that a lot
people, in spite of the difficulty of doing zazen, a lot of people would
like to stay there and stay there just because of that.

Then Rohatsu sesshin came up,
and the same thing started happening again, in exactly the same way.
That’s what I described to you on the telephone [see link top and bottom
to 1995 interview], that you put on the internet. Should I repeat that?

DC: Whatever you wish.

JM: The same thing started
happening in the same way. It started as a means of coping with the pain,
then something opened up again. It was much clearer this time. I was able
to do it much better. I asked for dokusan, and I told Suzuki Roshi about
it. He didn’t say anything, just Mmmmm, yes, OK. I told him that zazen was
like standing on your head -- it was something that was simple to do but
you couldn’t do it very long. I told him it was like balancing a ball or
an egg or something like that. He didn’t seem to have any reaction to what
I said. He just let me talk on and on and just nodded and nodded. Later,
the same evening, in his lecture, he said You know somebody said today
that zazen was like standing on your head. This is very true! I almost
fell off my zafu.

That feeling continued too. It
wasn’t just a temporary means of dealing with the pain; it was something
that enveloped me completely. It continued all day long. I felt like I was
in some kind of an energy flux, very high. During some afternoon work
period during sesshin, I was listening to somebody talk, and this guy was
saying something, blabbing something. I listened to him and I sensed that
there was a kind of barrier between himself and actual experience. That
what he was saying, his words and his feeling, his expression, there was
this gap between actual experience and his thinking. I had the feeling
that this is the source of human suffering, this gap, this separation. I
told that to Suzuki Roshi. I said I think I can understand why people
suffer. He said that it was very good to see that. He told me that this
kind of experience is very good because -- he said, Now you know where to
put your effort. And during his evening teisho at some point, either that
evening or another evening, he said You hear about enlightenment
experiences. Or you read about them in books. Well, we have them here,
too. Maybe he was -- at the time I thought everybody -- I thought Dick
Baker and Peter and everybody had had these experiences too. I thought
this is just what zazen is about; I didn’t think it was happening just to
me. I felt that what was happening to me was extremely important, but also
that this is what everybody went through when they practice zazen. I
thought that Tim Buckley and Peter Schneider and Dick Baker and all of
these older students that I was in awe of, that they all had the same
experiences. I didn’t find out until later that they didn’t, necessarily.

After that sesshin, I thought
I had really achieved some kind of enlightenment or something. But then
after the sesshin was over, day after day this feeling started receding. I
tried desperately to hold on to it, and as a result fell into another
panic attack, just trying to hold onto that experience. Suzuki Roshi never
gave me any intimation that it was temporary. He never said anything about
it one way or the other except when he told me that now I know where to
put my effort. I told Suzuki Roshi about my anxiety problem, and he said,
Have you been working on a koan? I barely even knew what a koan was; I was
amazed that he thought I might be working on a koan, and fell into a state
of anxiety.

Anyway, I got over it on my
own. I stayed down there through the winter. I had to go up for my Army
physical in January.

DC: You stayed at Tassajara
through the winter?

JM: Yes. You were there too.
That was an interesting winter. I kept sitting, and my sitting kept
getting stronger and stronger; more powerful feeling in my zazen, little
by little, I got better at it. The next important thing that happened to
me, the next turning point in my practice, was during the first sesshin in
April?

DC: April would be the end of
the training period.

JM: OK. Now they have cabins
up there, but there is that little flat area, you have to climb up a steep
path, now they have stone stairs up there. That was one of the few places
that got any sun. I was up during break time, in the morning -- you were
there too at that time, in the same place --

DC: You just mean Rick was at
Tassajara.

JM: Yes, he was at Tassajara
at the same time. I think both of us went up there. I had a realization
that –suddenly it struck me that everybody tries hard when they are
inspired or they want something -- they get pumped up by a book they read,
or they got excited by a lecture, or something, and then when their
excitement went down they stopped making an effort. I got obsessed with
this idea. For the first time it occurred to me that you could make an
effort completely independent of outside desire. Just make an effort,
without any purpose. That was kind of a revelation to me. Making an effort
just to make an effort, without being inspired, without being fired up. I
had a clear picture of how people try hard when they are excited and when
they want something, when they are stimulated by a lecture or teisho or
book, but when this inspiration went down, then they drooped. I thought,
Why does it have to be this way?

So when I went back to zazen,
I could sit zazen much better. I decided to just make an effort to make an
effort, completely independent of any idea or excitement or inspiration. I
was able to sit very stably. I didn’t have to be excited; I didn’t have to
have any ideas about beauty or getting somewhere. I just made an effort to
make an effort.

Then I continued practicing,
as the months went by, the feeling in my zazen got stronger and stronger.
In June of 1968, came the experience I described to you before, on the
telephone [see link top and bottom to 1995 interview]. The feeling in my
zazen got so strong that I felt that something was going to happen; some
change, something had to develop or happen soon. So I wanted to do zazen
every single chance I got, whenever I had a moment free. One day I was
planning to go on a hike with Peter Schneider and Tim Buckley. When you
printed the interview you said it was Rob Gove but it was Tim Buckley.
They had some responsibilities -- they were both officers and they had
something they had to do before we went. So I decided to sit in my room in
the dormitory. I went back there this time hoping that the dormitory was
still there and I’d be able to see the same wall that I saw before! But
the building had been completely rebuilt.

DC: What dormitory? You mean
when you just went.

JM: Yeah. I sat on my
bed and started doing zazen looking at the wall. As I told you before, a
circle of light, something like a soap bubble appeared on the wall in
front of me. I had the feeling that this was my mind, that this contained
my mind. This luminous circle started rising, and when it rose above the
level of my head, I was able to see everything, see reality, see the world
in a way that I never could possibly have imagined before. It was
completely free of any trace of mind, or idea, or thought. It was beyond
time and space. Like totally untouchable.

I had never imagined such a
thing before. Nobody could, because it is unimaginable. It is something
totally outside of normal human experience. That way of looking at reality
is infinite. It’s all the things you ever hear about in the sutras and so
on. Without marks, ungraspable, unthinkable. You can’t hold an idea of it
in your mind, all you can do is see it, feel it. It’s also not an
experience. We are used to having experiences. But they are all kind of
the same in that they all involve our feelings, and we have some memory of
it that has something to do with the experience itself. But this is
something of a totally different nature. But there was no feeling of
ecstasy or anything accompanying it. I didn’t feel like I was high. There
was no feeling of particular serenity, or ecstasy, or transport [?] of any
nature. Just the fact that it was a vision of reality that was beyond
imagination, beyond thought, unmarked by any trace of thought at all, was
so interesting, and compelling. Even though I had no particular feeling
about it at all, no feelings of happiness or power or greatness or
anything, still this aspect of it was so amazing. The first person I
talked to about it was Chino Sensei. I had no way to describe it, but I
tried and tried to describe it. He said, Many strange things happen to you
when you do zazen, and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them. Just
continue your practice.

Then I would try again to
describe it, and he would say something of the same nature. Then he
started to describe the way zazen should really feel. He said the way
zazen should really feel, you should feel like this, this energy is
flowing through your whole body, things like that. He started describing
the experience just the way I had -- and I said you just described what I
have been feeling. We talked about it more, and finally, he apparently
accepted that what happened to me was not just a type of hallucination,
like I had actually experienced earlier when I first started practicing.
Finally he told me, well, you should have no more problems from now on. I
had lots of problems in my life, but none of them were concerning zazen.
In a sense, it was a kind of opening, or a tear, a tear in the curtain of
thought that envelops all of us, a little rip. So from that time on I have
always been aware of a place in my mind that is completely free from fear,
free from suffering, free from egotism, free from elation, free from all
feelings, good and bad. Just totally free. The feeling -- my awareness of
that place -- I felt that being aware of that, I was indestructible.
Nothing could happen to me that could destroy me.

I’ve had all kinds of terrible
experiences in my life, most of which were caused by me. But since that
time that has always been the basis, the foundation of my psyche. And it
has grown. That was just a tiny, tiny pinhole at that time, and it has
continued to grow and grow and grow. Until, for almost how many years now,
45, 46 years since that experience, 44. I am aware of it all the time; not
just zazen. It has just become my everyday life. Though I feel like -- I
don’t feel particularly enlightened or anything, but my life is happy and
satisfying. I don’t feel that zazen is a separate or special activity
anymore. It’s more like to sit and do zazen is turning up the volume
rather than something entirely different.

Another aspect of that --
after I continued to mature a little bit, I mentioned to Chino Sensei that
-- he was my main confidante in this business, I felt like he was easier
to approach or talk to than Suzuki Roshi, who was always more remote and
awesome, hard to just simply chat with. I mentioned to Chino Sensei one
time that I thought that as your attainment deepened, one aspect of
deepening of a person’s attainment in practice was recognizing the same
attainment in everybody else. As with enlightenment, one aspect of
enlightenment was seeing everybody else’s enlightenment. Chino Sensei said
Yes, and moreover, allowing it. So I never had the feeling, all these
years, that I had gotten anything that everybody else doesn’t have. I feel
if there is any way in which I can help other people it is only to help
them see what they have themselves, not to tell them about something I
have that they don’t have. I never have that feeling at all.

DC: So what has happened since
then? When did you go to Japan?

JM: After that time -- shortly
after I had that experience, let us say -- it wasn’t an experience, but we
don’t have words for it so I will call it an experience, rather than
experience, it’s an event. It is something that happens to you. It is like
a permanent alternation of your psyche. At first the impact of it isn’t
very strong but it’s permanent. It doesn’t change, it just deepens or gets
bigger. It is an event in the sense like a tree falling or something like
that. It is something that happens that cannot be reversed. It is not
something that you experienced and you can remember, it is something that
actually happens to you, like cutting off a finger on a table saw or
something like that. That’s it. It’s done. It’s a permanent change that
just continues to affect your life more and more deeply afterwards but
never goes away. Furthermore, whether you are drunk or sober, sleeping or
awake, it doesn’t change it. Even in your dreams, it has as much effect on
you as during your waking life.

Anyway after that I had to
save money to go to Japan. For some reason I thought that going to Japan
was the natural step -- going into a “real” monastery in Japan. Like it
was something I naturally had to do. It is hard for me to say without
using Japanese. I felt like Tassajara was just a kind of little league
place, for people who didn’t -- just beginners, and the real thing was in
Japan. I didn’t realize that Tassajara is actually a pretty wonderful
place to do zazen. In Japan I’ve never been to a place as good as
Tassajara to practice. It is a very wonderful place.

So I wanted to save money to
go to Japan. I went back to working at the furniture shop, and sometimes I
would work as a carpenter. Then Suzuki Roshi got sick. I was afraid to go
to Japan to myself. Sally Block went to that nunnery -- what was the name
of that place near Nagoya? What was his name -- remember that couple --
Ron Browning.

DC: Ron and Joyce Browning.

JM: Joyce Browning went to
that nunnery. Sally went there and then she came back. After Suzuki Roshi
died we got married. I didn’t really want to get married, but I was afraid
to go to Japan by myself. For some reason, I don’t know why. So we went
together. Suzuki Roshi died in December 1971, right. Sally escaped from
that nunnery. She couldn’t stand it; they didn’t do zazen. All they did
was go around serving tea to people. She thought it was all BS, so she ran
away from there and wound up in Antaiji.

Rick: Dick Baker actually
broke her out.

JM: That’s right. She
contacted Dick and he came to meet her and she left with him. That’s
right, I forgot about that. That’s how she found out about Antaiji. She
was such a fanatic. She got a very bad case of sciatica sitting at Antaiji.

Rick: You’ve got a long ways
to go.

JM: Well, I can’t tell all the
stuff that happened to me that time. She thought that she couldn’t sit any
more. She wanted to study Buddhism academically, so we both ended up going
to the University of Chicago and doing a kind of crash Sanskrit course.
Under Stephan _____ [Anaker?]. There is a book on Vasubandhu in the
Tassajara library that was written by him. He was my Sanskrit teacher at
the University of Chicago. And we audited courses at Berkeley after that
for a while. I was working part time at the furniture shop. Finally in
March of 1973 we went to Japan. We went by ship from Seattle. We went to
Kyoto and stayed with some of her friends from Antaiji for a little while
until we found our own place and got some English teaching jobs. I sat at
Antaiji as much as possible until Uchiyama Roshi retired and they moved
way up to the Japan seaside, the place they are now.

I had to find some other place
to practice. I sat a little bit with Morinaga Roshi at his temple outside
of Ryoanji, Daishunin, or something like that.

DC: Did you know Daijo? He
might not have been there then; it was a long time ago.

JM: No. We lived near there. I
used to jog around that pond every day. Then Sally started practicing in
Myoshinji under Yamada Mumon. I used to sit with them down there -- this
is one of my great regrets -- I could have done sanzen with Yamada Mumon,
one of the most famous Zen masters of the 20th century, and I
passed up the opportunity. But I did talk to him. I had an interview with
him one time. I said that I –I can’t remember how I put it, that I
understood zazen, what zazen was about. He asked me very strictly, Under
whom? I said under Suzuki Roshi, and he said Ahhh. I’ve been thinking you
were an exceptionally patient person!

Then I met a couple of people
who were going up to Hoshinji. ____ told me about Hoshinji in Obama and
the Roshi there --

DC: Harada Seiki

JM: He had just moved there
from his own temple, and there were a few foreigners there who had started
practicing with him in his temple before he even took over Hosshinji. The
interesting thing about that place is because of that foreigners were on
the ground floor. Some foreign students came to Hosshinji with Harada
Roshi when he took over the temple, so it was probably the first place in
Japan where there were foreign monks who had seniority over the Japanese.
It made it a much better place to practice for foreigners than there had
ever been before, probably, in Japan at all. Daigaku wasn’t there yet; he
came a little bit later. He came first to Antaiji, too, and I met him
there and later he went to Hosshinji. He came very shortly after I started
going up there, then he became a monk and stayed there.

I lived in Kyoto and taught
and did zazen either by myself or with Sally and her friends in Myoshinji.
I did every sesshin. They had sesshins every month, the first week of
every month, six times a year [?]. I did every one of them for about six
years. Would just drive up there in my little car

CD: Where? At Hosshinji?

JM: AT Hosshinji. It only took
about two and a half hours to reach Hosshinji from my house in northern
Kyoto, which wasn’t too bad. I had work that I could get away from. That
was probably the most important part of the Zen practice I did in Japan.
After Suzuki Roshi, I consider Harada Sekkei my true teacher.

DC: You still see him?

JM: No, I haven’t been up
there. I should go. I don’t know if he is still alive. I guess he is. I
don’t have a car.

DC: He is. It’s easy to get
there.

JM: In Japan, I worked 7 days
a week. You get into ruts. People have to make you do things, sometimes.
If somebody said, Take me to Hosshinji, I have to go to Hosshinji, I’d do
that.

DC: Hey, I’ll do that. I’ll go
to Kyoto, and say, Hey, take me to Hosshinji. I’ve been there. I met him
once. In 1988 when I first arrived. Met him and Tangen next door. Mike
Jamvold, who you might know, he is sitting at Bukokuji now. He said Tangen
is like totally gone. Dementia.

JM: Too bad. I talked to
Tangen Roshi on the phone one time, only.

I’m getting the order of
things mixed up. During the time I was practicing there, Sally was going
to Kobe –she started doing sesshins again in the temple where Yamada Mumon
was the Jushoku. Then she wanted to move to Kobe because of that. I just
kind of tagged along. We moved down there and lived in Kobe for two years.
Then Yamada Mumon became the Kansho of Myoshinji, during the time that we
were living there. It was that time I was practicing there. Ach! I got to
figure this out... I have completely forgotten. I didn’t realize that I
couldn’t remember. Oh I know -- the reason we moved to Kobe was because of
the children’s school, it wasn’t her practice. Then later we moved back to
Kyoto again --

DC: What children’s school?
You were teaching there?

JM: Our children. We had two
adopted Korean children. They had to go to high school. There is so much
stuff to tell. If I told you everything we would be here until tomorrow.
At the time she was sitting at that temple Mumon was already at Myoshinji.
His successor was there in Kobe. We lived there in Kobe because of the
kids’ school, then moved back to Kyoto. Then I think it was after Mumon
died that we came back to Kyoto.

DC: No, Mumon died after I
came to Japan. Because he was senile. He didn’t talk for like the last
five years of his life.

JM: That’s right, he wasn’t
teaching anymore. She studied with his successor in that temple in Kobe
for a while. When Fukushima Roshi moved into Tofukuji, became the head of
the training, became the semmon dojo, she wanted to practice under him, so
we moved back to Kyoto. That’s the same area I lived where you visited me.

DC: Fukukshima Roshi? was he
in Mumon’s lineage?

JM: No. But he just had a
reputation so she wanted to study with him. She already know about him. We
had some other foreign friends that practiced with him. He was from a
temple in the Okayama area where Harada Shodo was.

DC: Wonder what temple that
was?

JM: He moved out of there. He
had foreign students there, too.

DC: In Okayama?

JM: Yeah.

DC: Wow. Wasn’t much sign of
it when I was there. There was just Harada Shodo and his students.

JM: He moved to Tofukuji and
became the abbot of the semmon dojo there and later became abbot of all of
Tofukuji. But I started studying with him, too, and for five years I did
koans with him.

After that, our marriage
ended, and Sally came back to America, and I stayed there. I married --
the friends that I met from the Antaiji era started going to the
Philippines, and they invited me down there. It was nice to get out of
Japan. I was kind of in a tailspin after the end of my marriage with
Sally. I decided to marry a young Filipina.

DC: Wait a minute. Is the
woman you are married to now her mother?

JM: Yes.

DC: Oh, wow! Right!

JM: I met that woman that you
just saw (on Skype), her mother. We bonded instantly. When we saw one
another we felt like we had known one another for years. We have always
had that feeling.

JM: Yeah, something like that.
My life is very complicated. Anyway, the two of them -- after that child
finished Japanese elementary school in Japan, I didn’t see any point to
her going to middle school and high school in Japan.

DC: I understand! So you took
her to the States?

JM: Yeah. Joy wanted to go to
the States, too. I didn’t know any other place where I wanted to live.

DC: What’s the child’s name?

JM: Holly. Rick and I had a
wonderful time growing up in Vermont. The school system there is really
good. I called up some people I knew, old neighbors that still lived
there, and we decided to go there. At first we rented an apartment, and I
went there during my school vacations. I have very long vacations, from
the colleges where I teach. I found a house in the same neighborhood, a
house that I knew as a child, that I had gone trick-or-treating to at
Halloween, and so on. Used to be a watch repair shop there, across the
street from my old junior high school and high school. It was a huge
house, 19th century house, built in 1867 on a quarter of an
acre of land, for only $55,000. We had bought a house in Santa Rosa while
my father was living up there. We bought it for $190,000 and kept it
rented for ten years, and the rent paid for all the mortgage payments. And
sold it for $290,000 ten years later, during the tech bubble. So we had
all of this money. We were able to pay cash for this house in Vermont.

Joy started going to college
there, to become a nurse. Very intelligent, talented woman. But she
decided that she wanted to get on with her life, as she put it, so she
hooked up with somebody else and announced that she wanted to divorce me
one day. At that time, I was left with this house and all this stuff I
sent -- all our furniture and everything, by container, to that house. And
Joy just walked out on me, completely, and left me with this house. So I
asked --

DC: But you weren’t living in
Vermont? Was she living in Vermont? Joy?

JM: Joy was, yes. Joy and
Holly were living there, and I was going back and forth during my vacation
time. So she walked out and left me with this big house with all this
stuff in it. Which I had collected for the last thirty years. Antiques,
art work, and everything, I sent there.

DC: You mean Western and
Japanese?

JM: Mostly Japanese. After she
left, divorced me, I asked Flora if we could get married, so she could get
a visa. I just thought we would continue the same relationship that we
had. But she takes the marriage thing very seriously. So I find myself
married again.

DC: You said you asked Flora
if she would marry you, to help her visa-wise.

JM: Yeah. But she was married
to a pretty horrible guy in the Philippines. She had been separated from
him for several years. Joy insisted that she get a divorce in America,
from him, so she was already ostensibly free from him, even though there
is no divorce in the Philippines.

DC: Well we’d probably better
wrap it up? Would you like to make a concluding statement? What are you
doing now? Are you relating to any temple or teacher or anything like
that?

JM: No. Fukushima Roshi -- I
would have liked to continue -- I studied there for a long time. But Sally
was coming to sesshins and it was very uncomfortable to sit in the sesshin
with Sally, you know! So I stopped sitting with Fukushima. And also, at
the same time I felt like she was going to a lot of effort to -- she was
coming from America, she married some rich doctor, she was coming from
America just to do sesshins there. I didn’t want to disturb her sesshins.
She was going through a tremendous effort to be there. So not only for me,
but for her also, I thought it wasn’t good for us to sit together. At the
same time I had this young Filipino that I had to take care of. It is hard
to come home from work -- she is just sitting around the house waiting for
me to come home from work -- you know, it’s hard for me to say, I’m going
to go spend the evening doing zazen. So I just started sitting on my own.
Since that time I haven’t had any formal...I just continue to sit on my
own. But my knees are in pretty bad shape now so I don’t do a lot of
zazen. But that doesn’t mean that I feel in any sense whatsoever that I am
outside of Zen, or away from Zen, in any sense. For me Zen is, just as it
always has been, my real life, in a sense. I talked one time to Harada
[Seiki] Roshi about life outside. Practicing. It started getting really
hard for me to come to sesshin because we were living in Kobe and the
distance was almost double, the drive up there. His advice to me was, he
said, “Zen is like this.” He made a big circle. “Zen is like this, and
everything else is like this.” Some little, small portion. That’s been the
way it has been for me. Zen envelops everything and includes everything.
All other concerns are kind of minor details contained within the great
sphere of Zen. Whether I’m doing zazen or not doing zazen, it’s still
always the same. It includes my teaching, and my artwork. Part of this
story also, I started studying calligraphy here in America.

DC: I went to a show of yours.
You did real big --

JM: Real big stuff. I studied
under Morita Shiryu for 25 years, until he died.

DC: You would call him a shodo
master?

JM: He was a calligraphic
artist.

DC: In Japanese you wouldn’t
say shodo? What would you say?

JM: No, he didn’t like the
term shodo. For him it smacked of traditional Japanese slavish
calligraphy.

DC: What did he say if he
didn’t say shodo?

JM: Sho. Just sho. [sho =
calligraphy, do = way] He was one of the founders of the post-war avant
garde calligraphy movement that took kanji as just the starting point of
abstract calligraphy. He and his group were in communication with Franz
Klein, the abstract painter, post-war abstract painter who painted things
that looked like calligraphy; splashy, black and white abstract
expressionist works. But that's another whole story. I still do that, too,
and continue to get better. But I’m not very good at it yet. But I still
keep doing it, like a fool. I can’t stop it; it’s too interesting. Even
though I’m not very good at it. I very rarely do anything that I would
want to show anybody. Still, it’s such a profound thing. I can’t stop
doing it. It’s not zazen, but it’s something like that. My secondary
zazen.

So in conclusion. Now, I’m
getting, in a few years my college job is going to end because of forced
retirement age.

DC: How old are you?

JM: I am 67.

DC: Yeah, me too.

JM: I’m thinking of coming
back here, to America. And wondering what to do with myself.

DC: Well, are you going to
live with your wife?

JM: Yes. But, for me, my art
and marriage and so forth are all kind of secondary things. I’m still
wondering what I can do to help other people who want to practice Zen.
That’s one of the reasons why I went to Tassajara this time. I find that
Zen Center is so big and so set in its ways already that I don’t know if
there’s any place for me there.

DC: Well, I don’t know. People
use Zen Center both from the inside and from the outside. There’s a lot of
people that you know, rent space at Green Gulch, City Center, Tassajara --
have people come down and do workshops in this and that. And there’s a
tremendous variety of people there. People who are teachers within Zen
Center, that’s a lot more narrow. But even that has a lot of -- there’s a
tremendous amount of diversity. But, they still have to go through the Zen
Center mill. I don’t think you’d want to do that.

JM: No.

DC: But Zen Center has more --
you know all institutions have their limits and problems, but it’s pretty
good. And the thing is, there’s not a single teacher. We have Steve Stucky
as the central abbot. But he’s almost like an administrative abbot. There
are so many different teacher people relate to, and some people relate to
no teacher. I think it’s really good.

JM: I had a chance, after the
end of my marriage with Sally, I had an opportunity to enter Hosshinji and
become a monk there, like Daigaku. But by that time -- I’ve never been
able to really -- I used to believe that I wanted to become a priest. I
went to Japan to do that; that was my intention. Over the years, living in
Japan, I’ve stopped wanting to be a priest. I’ve always been kind of
maverick.

Rick: Sort of like McCain.

JM: And Sarah Palin, exactly!
[laughter] For better or for worse. I don’t consider that a particularly
good thing, I’m just kind of... and also Fukushima Roshi, too. I knew he
wanted me to continue practicing there, and he did ask me to come back and
practice there. The head monk said one time, he told me that he had been
told by Fukushima Roshi that if he had me for twenty years, twenty more
years, he could make a great teacher out of me. At that time, I made a
gesture like [laughs], with my hands shaking, I said, M-u-u-u. He
pretended to reach down for the bell with a shaking hand, and jingle the
bell, to reject my answer. We were both imagining me still doing Mu after
twenty years! Two old men! But he never told that directly to me. He said
that to the head monk. So that was another opportunity that I didn’t take,
to become a real, a credentialed Zen teacher.

I’m satisfied with my
practice, for myself. I’m completely satisfied with my practice for
myself. But I wonder how I can help other people, without having any
credentials to point to. But I am working with other people. People like
having me around. Japanese and Filipinos and Americans, too. Suzuki Roshi
asked me one time what I wanted to do with my life and I told him I wanted
to be a zazen teacher. And he said, “Oh, then you must spend many years
with your teacher.” I didn’t know why, exactly, but now I do. I know
exactly why you have to spend many years with your teacher. To learn how
to teach. I thought if you just practiced and deepened your own practice
you would naturally be able to teach other people. But I think the style
of teaching, the way of teaching, you learn from your teacher. So I never
had a chance to -- well actually I did have a chance to spend many years
with a teacher but my life was already so complicated that I couldn’t
bring myself to do it. Also, I was burdened with lots of different
talents, and an irresistible urge to practice them. I don’t think I could
have stood to just live in a monastery without being able to do -- make
furniture and paint pictures and do calligraphy and play music and all
these other things. I just can’t stop doing those things. I don’t do them
because I want to achieve something with them; I just can’t stop doing
them. So I don’t know if I could have brought myself just to live in a
monastery and do the straight monastic thing, and get the credentials as a
teacher.

So here I am. I would just
like to help other people as much as possible but I don’t know exactly how
to do it. That’s all. I have no desire to be famous. I have no desire to
be thought of as a Roshi. I don’t want to be a Roshi.

DC: I hate that word; so sick
of it. I really don’t like the way it’s used in America. Most people don’t
use it.

JM: I don’t want to be a monk.
I don’t want to shave my head; I don’t want to wear robes; I don’t want to
fumble with my beads. I don’t care if anybody knows my name. I don’t want
to be famous. And I would be very happy just to continue my own life, just
as it is, except that -- if I felt that there were enough other people
around that were really -- had deep enough experience to --

DC: You probably could get a
certification to teach from one of these teachers outside of Zen Center
like Norman Fischer, or Gil Fronsdal. Meg Gawler got certification from
Jack Kornfeld to teach Vipassana, after doing a one month retreat with
him. You know, because she had been practicing through the years.

JM: I wouldn’t ever do such a
thing.

DC: Well, you were saying you
didn’t have certification and I was saying that if you want it you could
probably get it.